A G K Y R A

BBC News reports the results of a worldwide poll (conducted on behalf of the BBC World Service): according to almost everyone, internet access is a fundamental human right.

Don’t these people know what a human right is? It’s not just something you happen to like or enjoy. Or is watching American Idol also a basic human right, together with ski vacations and ice cream?

It’s also not just something convenient. Or are dishwashers, electric razors, and cell phones also fundamental human rights?

The secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, Dr. Hamadoun Toure, says that “the right to communicate cannot be ignored.” How did internet access suddenly become equated with a so-called right to communicate?

The BBC report tells us that “countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.” If we’re talking about human rights, we’re not talking about rights that are particular to citizens of one country or another. There is such a thing as a legal right that is particular to one country or one kind of person. Ancient Roman citizens had the legal right not to be crucified. Slaves had no such right. People on trial in the U.S. have the legal right not to incriminate themselves. No claim is made that people in Mongolia have such a right. It’s not a human right but a legal one.

There is so much confusion evident in this BBC report that I wonder how much of it is due to poor survey design incorrect interpretation or reporting of the results, or just plain shallowness by the respondents. Let me help shed some light: when we’re talking about human rights, we’re really talking about human obligations and duties. If someone else has a human right, then I have a moral obligation and duty to that person, and so do you, to protect and preserve whatever it is he has a right to. If to life, then I must not take the person’s life and must do all I can to protect it. If to religion, then I must not try to coerce a person to believe something or to act in a way that would violate his genuine religious scruples, and I must defend a person’s right to hold his religious beliefs and act according to their dictates.

If you believe internet access is a fundamental human right, then you should by all means act immediately to fulfill your own personal obligation to give internet access to anyone who doesn’t have it. Have fun!

Augustine’s Contra Academicos, or “Against the Academics” is his earliest writing that we still have. It dates from November 386, when he and his students and friends were vacationing at the villa of Cassiciacum in Italy. He had just become a Christian and was preparing to be baptized. The work consists of two layers, really. One layer is a series of dialogues held between him and his students, in which they discuss the relation between wisdom and happiness, and the other layer consists in two letters that Augustine wrote to his friend Romanianus (father of one of the students) when he sent him a copy of the dialogues. The Academics were the members of the philosophical school that had been founded by Plato (the Academy), but the specific Academics that Augustine argues against in this work were the members of the Middle and Late Academy (ca. 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE), who maintained the skeptical position that truth couldn’t be known and therefore one ought not to assent to anything.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I just finished a paper on the work and want to put it out there for anyone who might be interested — probably no one! I’ll send it off to a journal before too long, where people who genuinely might be interested in it could find it. My argument in the paper is that Augustine has three roles that can be discerned in the layers of the text: teacher of rhetoric to his students, concerned friend to Romanianus and those present at Cassiciacum, and seeker after wisdom. The significance of this is that many interpreters of Contra Academicos wrongly assume that Augustine is writing to or for the Academics themselves, and they forget his more personal concerns for those around him. They treat it as a philosophical treatise rather than a rhetorical and personal appeal. I also give a summary analysis of Augustine’s early epistemology from that work and take up the question of the historicity of the dialogues.

By the way, the reason I haven’t posted anything in quite a while is just that I have been busy with school. The fall semester is nearly over, and I only have one more class in the spring while I prepare for my doctoral comprehensive exams in April. I hope to be able to resume posting regularly before too long.

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